Review: Kivio 0.9.1 - page 3

Going With the Flowcharts

Kivio is one of a slew of offerings that are about to come
out of the theKompany.com, which is described by its president and CEO as "the
only commercial company focused on KDE."

That person is Shawn Gordon, whose new company is moving
through the KDE community like an expert buyer through a curio shop. Like that
curio shopper, Gordon is picking up attractive, perhaps a tad worn-down items,
dusting them off and seeing if he can make them work better.

This gentle "are you finished with this?" approach
is serving Gordon well so far, having already released PowerPlant, a commercial
offering of Linux development tools.

Kivio is the next product to likely ship out theKompany.com's door.
Originally called Queesio, this application was the creation of software
developer Dave Marotti.

Marotti had begun to put together Queesio as a Linux
flowcharting alternative and received some impetus to approach the KOffice
development team to see how his application could fit within their framework.

"Prior
to Shawn approaching me, I received an email from someone asking if I had ever
thought about porting Queesio to KOffice," Marotti related. "I sent an
email to the KOffice mailing list and a few of the other KOffice/KDE developers
asking if anyone wanted to help port Queesio over to KOffice/KDE. I received no
response, so I dropped that idea."

KOffice's loss was theKompany.com's gain, Marotti continued.

"It
was actually the same week (or the next, I don't remember) that Shawn
approached me and asked if I wanted to get together with theKompany.com to do a
KOffice/KDE port. I agreed, and now we are working together to fill a void in the list of Linux applications,"
Marotti said.

While Gordon fully intends to make money on all of these
KDE-related ventures, he does not intend to deprive the Linux community of open
source applications. Gordon announced that his company will be releasing Kivio
as a GPL product, free of charge.

Customers who acquire Kivio will have the source and the
binaries for the basic Kivio product, Gordon explained. The stencils' data, he
added, will be copyrighted and sold to customers on an as-needed basis. The
basic flowcharting shapes stencil set will be included free with the Kivio
release, but the set's source will remain closed.

If additional sets are needed, customers will be able to
purchase them for about $5 each and add them to their personal stencil
collection.

Gordon also detailed the addition of a stencil builder
module to the basic Kivio application, which, when installed, will enable users
to create their own stencils in an automated fashion. This stencil builder
would not be open sourced, and would sell for around $50.

With this revenue plan in place, Gordon hopes to become a
successful commercial presence in the Linux arena.

If Kivio can work out its beta glitches, theKompany.com will
have a strong entry into this new market it is creating.